A Garveyite's commmentary on world events and other stuff. (10 years of informed commentary)

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Thursday, September 17, 2009

On Caster Semenya

And so it appears that Caster Semenya is a hermaphrodite. I fault this entire thing on the Caster's trainers and the SA Atheletic authorities. All that could have and should have been found out before Berlin. There are a lot of people making a lot of fuss over this. On the one hand I agree that the way this got out to the public was very bad. However as an athlete myself, I believe the investigation itself was totally acceptable.

There is a reason why men and women do not compete directly in track and field. Talk all you want about men and women being "the same" but the fact is that there are significant physical differences between men and women and these differences are very much on display when it comes to top sports, in this case track and field.

There are no actual women who can outrun Usain Bolt. In fact most of the fastest women in the world cannot compete with some of the slowest of the top mens contenders. It is a physical impossibility. And that's OK. It wasn't meant to be that way. When someone says so and so does such and such well for a woman, in certain sports that is a compliment, not a put down. Are there women who can beat men at track events? Certainly. I get beat by women in better physical condition than I am all the time. But I would be a fool to extrapolate that to some social PC statement about females in sports.

The determination that Coster is a hermaphrodite, is good for female athletes. You know, the ones who don't have testicles that have not dropped or Testosterone levels 4X what normal females have. That is like allowing a team that uses steroids to compete.

Lastly, for those that want to see racism in this, please note that in the history of track and field and other sports like gymnastics and weight lifting there is a history of countries passing off men as women. Particularly from Soviet block states. It is unfortunate that Caster is on suicide watch, but as I said earlier the blame lies with her trainers, doctors and yes, family for not dealing with this. With all the anti-doping measures in place, there is no way that her high testosterone levels were not noticed. How could it be that if she had no uterus (as was reported) that anyone missed that she never had a period (assuming that to be the case)? I know that women who are body builders and the like can frequently have their periods missed, but the training for track and field is different and I would suspect that such a thing should have been noticed.